Introducing Cerana

Update: 2 days after publishing this blog post, we’ve released Cerana 0.1 (TheHive 3.0.1) which fixes a number of issues. We encourage you to use 3.0.1 instead of 3.0.0.

The friendly honeybees at TheHive’s code kitchen were pretty busy lately even though winter came and temperatures have been close to zero Celsius in Paris, France. As we wrote a couple of weeks ago on this very blog, we are happy to announce Cerana to the world, available immediately.

Cerana or TheHive 3.0.0 is the latest (and obviously greatest) release of a now highly popular open source, free Security Incident Response Platform (or SIRP for short). Its flagship feature in comparison to previous releases is Dynamic Dashboards.

Dynamic Dashboards

Dynamic Dashboards replace the Statistics module in Cerana to allow you to explore the data available in Elasticsearch, which TheHive uses for storage, in many ways. For example, you can have a usage breakdown of Cortex analyzers, the number of open cases per assignee, the number of alerts per source (MISP, email notifications, DigitalShadows, Zerofox, Splunk, …), the number of observables that have been flagged as IOCs in a given time period, how many attributes were imported from MISP instances, top 10 tags of imported MISP attributes or incident categories.

Dynamic Dashboards

Dynamic Dashboards can be created by an analyst and kept private or shared with the other team members. Dashboards can also be exported and imported into another instance. This would facilitate community participation in the establishment of valuable data exploration graphs to drive DFIR activity and seek continuous improvement.

When you’ll migrate to Cerana, you won’t have to build dashboards from scratch. We recreated more or less those which were available under the Statistics view and included them in the Cerana build.

Cortex and MISP Health Status

Cerana will also allow you to monitor the health status of all the Cortex and MISP instances that it is connected to. In the bottom right corner of TheHive’s Web UI, the Cortex and MISP logos appear when you have configured the integration with those products as in previous releases. However, the logos will have a small outer circle which color will change depending on whether Cortex and/or MISP instances are reachable or not.

Cortex & MISP Health

If TheHive can’t reach N out of M Cortex/MISP instances, the outer circle will be orange. If it can’t reach all M instances, the circle will red. If everything is fine, the circle will be green. The exact status of each Cortex/MISP instance can be seen in the About page. And when you try to run analyzers on a Cortex which cannot be reached, TheHive will tell you so as well.

Cortex & MISP: Version & Status

Sighted IOCs

In previous releases of TheHive, observables can be flagged as IOCs. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve seen them in your network. Think for example of a suspicious attachment which you’ve submitted to Cuckoo or Joe Sandbox through Cortex. The analyzer returns some C2 addresses to which the sample tries to connect to. You’d be right to add those C2 addresses to your case and flag them as IOCs. Then you search for them in your proxy logs and you find connection attempts to one out of four. In previous versions, you’d add a seen label but this would be inconsistent among analysts. One may use found instead. Another will add a description and no labels.

To avoid such situations and give you a simple way to declare an IOC as seen, Cerana adds a sighted toggle which you can switch on/off. We will leverage this toggle in future versions to indicate sightings when sharing back cases to MISP.

Other Features and Improvements

Cerana contains numerous other features and improvements such as:

Case template import, export

The ability to assign default values to metrics and custom fields to case templates

The ability to assign by default tasks to their rightful owners in case templates

Show already known observables when previewing MISP events in the Alerts page

Add autonomous systems to the list of default datatypes

Single-sign on using X.509 certificates (in BETA currently)

We will update the documentation for Cerana in the upcoming weeks. So stay tuned.

Download & Get Down to Work

If you have an existing installation of TheHive, please follow the migration guide.

If you are performing a fresh installation, read the installation guide corresponding to your needs and enjoy. Please note that you can install TheHive using an RPM or DEB package, use Docker, install it from a binary or build it from sources.